gavinparsons

While I'm happy to admit the girl is extremely tough and daring to get into water that cold without a drysuit, I find this place abhorent. Those beluga whales are captive animals. There was a spate of underwater photographers going to this place and taking similar pictures (not naked) a couple of years back, not long after I'd seen wild beluga whales in Churchill Manitoba. These captive animals are in a prison and there is no need for them to be. Yes there is ice and snow, but would anyone be making oooh and ah noises and saying how wonderful the pictures where if it was dolphins in a dolphinarium? I hope not.

As photographers we are constantly reminded not to touch coral or damage marine life just for a picture. Well this is the same thing. Just becase we can put beluga whales into captivity and have naked women swim with them for a picture, doesn't mean we should. Belugas, like all cetaceans should be in the wild. There are plenty of places to see and swim with wild dolphins and whales on their terms. So if you want to photograph belugas do it in the wild. If you want a naked woman with them Photoshop her in and stop tormenting these beautiful animals.

Sorry I know this topic goes back to May, but I may have so relevant helpful information. I am a director of a UK based organisation called British Divers Marine Life Rescue. We rescue marine animals - whales, dolphins, porpoises and seals etc.

Dolphins strand for so many reasons that it is easy to speculate, but difficult to pin down what it could be. Naval exercises, chasing fish or a confused/injured/sick lead animal all could be plausible in this case. The fast response of the public was incredible, but if you are ever in a situation like this please please please, do NOT pull a cetacean (whale, dolphin, propoise) by the tail. The muscles and joints running into the tail are quite fragile when pulled ways in which they were not designed.

I don't want to diss what those people did, as they saved a lot of lives their, but it's better to have the information and you can tell others if you see it for yourself.

I hope that helps

Gavin Parsons
Director
British Divers Marine Life Rescue

Digital photography has been around for such a short time and yet has come so far. But it has only really taken us back in time. As some have already mentioned Ansel Adams and his piers manipulated the hell out of their original images and I am changing my attitude back to what it was when I started photography. I'm probably one of the few underwater photographers who actually studied photography at college at a time before digital technology and before slide film was the norm. Sure we had slide film, but mostly we used colour neg and black and white neg. Plus we had 35mm, medium format and large format cameras to play with. We had a massive darkroom with black and white and colour processing and I would spend hours in a chemical infested orange glow dodging and burning, cropping and tweaking until what was on the paper in front of me was how I imagined the final image to be.

When magazines wanted colour slides to really justify the cost of the scanners the companies bought, all that creativity died away and while it encouraged many photographers to hone certain in camera skills, it killed some of the creativity in producing a final image. Now that creativity is back and it doesn't turn your silver jewelery black! Photoshop is just a darkroom, without the need to convert the loft or take up the toilet all evening. It's a means to really put into pixels what your mind saw.

Many people who think themselves photographers I'm sad to say, can now produce well exposed, pin sharp pictures, but should that be the ultimate end result? I don't think so. Henri Cartier Bresson didn't produce pin sharp, frozen images, nor did my other hero Don MacCullin. But their images had emotions wrapped around the main subject. I'm fed up with seeing lifeless looking fish portraits or frozen nudibranchs. Where is the drama? where is the animal's sense of place in the world (or sea)? Digital photography has given us the world to create beautiful emotion filled images and the majority treat it as a way to try and recreate the constraints of slide film (with a lot of added saturation in many cases).